 and teach us about open source communities. I know that having these really emotionally heavy talks, but this one is going to be a bit more lighthearted and fun. So I hope you enjoy and I hope you learn something as well. Who's ever played a fantasy role playing game before? So it's kind of fun, right? You're teaming up, you're building a character, and you're just adventuring across the land. If you don't know about these kind of games, that's fine. It's not necessary to understand this talk, but basically there are different types of characters that you can play, there are quests you can go on, and generally it's just a lot of fun. So help or a video game, it seems like anything is possible, right? You can build your own character, you can build up skills over time, level up, get new items, you can even slay dragons. But you often don't go along, and nor should you in the tech world either. I started seeing some parallels between things that we do in games and things that we do in our lives and in our careers. And I got to thinking, wouldn't it be cool if our communities were more like that? Sands the dragon slaying. But unfortunately that's not often the case. Things can get unbalanced, and if you in a game go into an area with all of the same type of character, it's probably not going to go very well. And that would be pretty difficult. That's why when people tell me, I don't think I can contribute to open source because I don't know how to code. I'm not very good at coding. I've never really used GitHub before. And I tell them, there's all these other things that you can do. And just like in a game, if you had all the same character, things wouldn't work out very well. If you have all the same type of person or same type of skills in a community, so too do things become difficult. Games just aren't as fun when you have an unbalanced party and diversity helps groups overcome the most challenging quests. So I thought, we can do better than this. There has to be a better way. How can I reach out to people, the same people that tell me they love playing these games but they don't know much about coding or they don't feel that they're worthy in some way. I'm going to make some analogies here to different types of role-playing characters and how we can relate to them in our communities and in technology. I hope this will give you some ideas about how you can go home and apply this to your own teams and how you too can contribute even if you don't have the standard skills that people generally think of. So there are many faces of a technical team or an open source community. What do you think of when you think of open source contributors? Most people would say the coders, right? The people with those bright green GitHub contributor graphs. But if that's all we define contributing to be, then it's no wonder people are intimidated to join us. So look at all these other things that really drive a project to succeed. We have documentation writers, designers, testers, community managers, outreach, translators, support. The list just goes on. And we can really do better at attracting these kind of people and making them feel welcome. So I'm going to go through a couple of these in detail, relate them to what I feel their role or class would be within a game. And if you look at it like that, you'll see that everyone has a strength that they can bring. So the first one is what most people think about. You've got your mage, your magic user, right? Capable of turning these magic words into reality. And if you think about it, that's kind of what coding is like. You're typing these words into a computer and sometimes they don't even really make much sense, but something comes out at the end that's new and different and you created that. And so it feels like magic in a way. So that would be if coding was a game, these would be your magic users, your coders. But there's also, you've got to have some rogues in there too. These type of characters are always finding your secret entrances, your traps, they're sneaking around. And so you've got QA people here, testers, security people, trying to make sure you're not getting hacked into and even your users sometimes. I know I've had experiences where a user will come back to me with some kind of story of them using my software in a way that I never would have anticipated. So they can fit in there as well. You've also got the bards. And Bardscraft, compelling tells about the team and the product. They're out there to really just tell the world about what you're working on and what you're doing. And so they're taking the text about your project and making it accessible to people, telling the story in a way that's interactive and people can relate to. So for that team roles in your technical community would be copywriters, documentation writers, translators, community outreach, basically anyone that's using words to relate to people and tell them about the project and what they're doing. Then we have the fighters. These people I thought they're kind of down in the trenches. They're doing the dirty work that no one really sees sometimes because they're behind the scenes. And with that, if you've got a system administrator, a database administrator, dev ops, even some back end folks, basically these are the people that keep everything running so everyone else can do their job and use the product. Finally, or not finally, but we have the artisan. These type of people really make things accessible and unique and beautiful in your product. You've got your designers, your user interface people, user experience, accessibility, front end developers. They take what everyone else has created and put that nice sheen on it for other people to see and other people to interact with. And they too really contribute this crucial role that if people can't figure out how to use your software, if people look at it and say, I don't know how to use this. I don't think it makes sense. That's why we need these artisans around to help us make our software look the best it can be. And then this is often the most overlooked one. Every team, whether you're in a game or in life or in your career, you need a healer. It's healers can soothe all manner of wounds. If people are fighting within your team, they can help you with that. If you've got a thousand runaway bugs in your code, they can help you with that. And if there's one thing that I would say that we need more of in our technical communities, open source would be healers. Because these are your support people, your community managers, and really I think everyone can be sort of a healer in their own way. We've been talking a lot about empathy and empathy is something that anyone can use and apply in their communities to really create a better experience for everyone. And so I think everyone can kind of contribute in that way and the world needs more healers. But at the end of the day, open source is about more than just code. People say, oh well, this person is a great coder. So nothing else should matter. And if there being a terrible toxic person besides that, I think that is not all that matters because it's not just about the code. There are people behind the code. And open source is about community also. Community is what binds us together. Not how many lines of code you wrote, not how many issues you filed, but how you affected the lives of the people around you. And that's what I want people to leave here with today. A way to contribute to the teams and the organizations around you. A way to become a hero in your own way. Thank you.